# Jake Bjorseth

Jake Bjorseth works in creator marketing and social commerce. Through Return on Creators, Jake discusses helping brands use TikTok Shop and creator content to drive growth, while measuring whether that growth is profitable and brings in new customers.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/jake-bjorseth/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trndsttr
- Median of last 6 posts: 14 reactions, 5 comments (checked 2026-11-02)
- Topics: ecommerce, tiktok-shop, creator-marketing
- Based on 8 dated posts, latest 2026-09-24

## Summary

Jake Bjorseth is most useful for judging TikTok Shop and creator programs by new customers and business value, not headline GMV.

- Best for: A direct-to-consumer brand with an existing Shopify base planning a TikTok Shop push and wanting acquisition and retention.
- Not for: A high-ticket brand wanting a 30-day TikTok Shop spike from one paid celebrity post, measured on top-line GMV.
- Check first: Confirm commercial engagement and audience composition, since no rate card or audience data appears.

### Takeaways

- A TikTok Shop should be judged by the job it was given, not top-line sales.
- Repeat customer rate decides whether the channel is growing you or re-selling to you.
- Creator marketing is programming, not campaigns.

## Main ideas

- **A TikTok Shop should be judged by the job it was given, not by top-line sales**: Jake Bjorseth argues that platform revenue tells you very little about whether a shop is working, because shops are given different jobs: new customer acquisition, producing content that feeds other channels, proving demand to retail buyers, or margin. Read against the wrong job, a small shop looks like a failure and a large one looks like a success. For a consumables brand, they write, two or three million dollars a year of genuinely incremental sales can be worth more than ten million that cannibalises existing business.
- **Repeat customer rate is the number that decides whether the channel is growing you or re-selling to you**: A dollar of TikTok Shop revenue is not the same asset as a dollar of Shopify revenue, and Jake Bjorseth argues that any lender or acquirer sees the difference immediately. On TikTok Shop, he writes, you do not own the customer, the algorithm, or the creator, so a better-funded competitor can bid for the exact audience your brand just introduced. The practical consequences: keep the strongest offer on Shopify rather than making the platform the cheapest place to buy, since discount buyers repeat worse than full-price buyers, and track a cash multiplier over a 60/90/120-day window instead of waiting a year to find out whether an LTV assumption was right. The stance runs against the usual instinct that higher repeat purchase is always good — for a shop whose job is net-new acquisition, Jake Bjorseth wants the in-platform repeat rate low.
- **TikTok Shop's main ad product is a black box with hard limits, and the workarounds are operational**: Jake Bjorseth lists what GMV Max, TikTok Shop's primary ad product, cannot do: no retargeting, no objective other than conversion, no way to exclude existing customers or other audience sets, and no ability to point specific creatives at specific targets. It runs algorithmically against a budget and an ROI target, which creates the specific fear that the same creative, creator, and offer keep reaching people who already bought. Their three mitigations are to keep the merchandising assortment on TikTok Shop visibly different from other channels and ideally priced higher, to move 5–10% of ad budget to contracted creators pushing new SKUs behind reach campaigns so new consumers enter the algorithm's read, and to retire creatives before fatigue even when ROI still looks acceptable.
- **Creator marketing is programming, not campaigns**: The older model, as Jake Bjorseth describes it, structured everything around campaigns: a brand team set direction, media set an allocation plan, and influencers were slotted in as a side piece after the big decisions were made. That changed as creator performance outgrew previously larger line items. The winning model, in this account, treats creators as a standing growth capability — brought into creative planning, with media planned reactively around what creators make first, and tailored briefs that work like an individual campaign for each creator. Two diagnostic questions are posed to brands: are you always searching for creators or do you have a community ready at a moment's notice, and are creative concepts built in the office or alongside creators.
- **Product simplicity and market size decide whether a brand can scale through creators at all**: In a teardown of Mellow Sleep, Jake Bjorseth argues the product does the work in social commerce. A simple product needs no explanation and lands inside the 10–20 seconds a viewer gives a video; a product that needs rationale struggles regardless of creator quality. Breadth of market matters too: the major winners share a very large total addressable market, and the further social commerce progresses the more that holds, even though niche markets remain winnable. A third factor is creator throughput, measured as videos published per sample sent.
- **Creator reach is the easy part; ecommerce discipline is the last 10% that decides winning**: Jake Bjorseth describes building a social media and influencer business that got brands attention, where whether that attention converted, produced profitable contribution margin, or supported click-through rates was explicitly not the lane. TikTok Shop exposed the gap: the team knew TikTok and the creator landscape but not the fundamentals of selling directly. That led to bringing in James Bennett to handle merchandising strategy, attribution models, profit and loss, lifetime value optimisation, and omni-channel attribution, and later to Nick Van Kooten joining as agency president.
- **Every major channel follows the same arc, and creator marketing is still in the cheap early stage**: A short timeline post runs from 2000 to 2030 in five-year steps, pairing past regrets — the internet, search engine optimisation, cheap search clicks, early Facebook ads, social media, posting on TikTok before everyone else — with a projected regret about creator marketing. Jake Bjorseth argues each major channel moves through the same three stages: an early stage that is cheap, messy, and ignored by most; a middle stage where winners pull away and it feels like the endgame although it is far from over; and a late stage where everyone piles in, costs spike, and the edge is gone for good.

## Work to read

- [Where TikTok Shop's ad product stops working — and what to watch instead](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trndsttr_tiktok-shops-primary-ad-product-gmv-max-activity-7508189629729243136-ExsA)
- [The CAC and LTV math that decides whether TikTok Shop grows the business](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trndsttr_your-tiktok-shop-repeat-customer-rate-should-activity-7508182585840214017-CXKG)
- [Five TikTok Shop teardowns that show what a shop is actually for](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trndsttr_kevin-n-and-i-spent-this-weeks-tiktok-operators-activity-7514338073057472514-7J2N)
- [How Mellow Sleep is built to scale on TikTok Shop](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trndsttr_mellow-sleep-might-just-pull-off-a-100m-activity-7515425125370871808-gAlt)
- [Why creator marketing is moving from campaigns to programming](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trndsttr_the-creator-landscape-today-may-look-the-activity-7521247924517949440-CjmH)
- [The argument for moving on creator marketing now](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trndsttr_2000-wish-wed-invested-in-the-internet-activity-7517983485471477760-pwTj)
- [How Return on Creators was built, in Jake's own account](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/trndsttr_youre-only-ever-as-smart-as-the-people-you-activity-7521276591482621952-ZjNu)

## Brand relationships

- **Return on Creators** (employment)
- **VANA Group** (disclosed_partnership)
- **The Trendsetter** (mention)

## Partnerships

The material reviewed for this section is Jake Bjorseth's own writing about how brands should buy creator work, not a published offer to sponsor or partner with Jake Bjorseth directly. No rate card, media kit, sponsorship policy, or partnership inquiry route appears in the reviewed posts. What the posts do establish is the shape of the partnerships Bjorseth argues brands should build: ongoing creator programs rather than one-off campaigns, with creators brought into creative planning early and given tailored briefs to run with. In that model the operating requirements sit with the brand, not the creator — a standing bench of creators who can publish on short notice, creative concepts developed alongside creators rather than in-house, and media planned around creator output instead of the other way round. A separate thread on TikTok Shop adds the measurement side of the same argument: brands should know whether a given channel is acquiring net-new customers or re-buying existing ones, and Bjorseth treats a rising in-platform repeat rate as a warning sign rather than a win. That framing is directly relevant to a buyer planning TikTok Shop work, because it tells you what Bjorseth would push back on in a strategy conversation. Pairing creators with specific new SKUs, distinguishing a shop's job (acquisition, content supply, retail proof, or margin), and keeping offers and assortment distinct between channels are the practical moves the posts describe. None of this is documented as a service Bjorseth sells, and no pricing, deliverables, exclusivity terms, or booking process is stated in the reviewed material. Readers should treat this section as evidence of the approach Bjorseth brings to a partnership discussion, not as a description of a packaged sponsorship product. The absence of documented formats reflects what was reviewed, not a claim that Bjorseth never takes on commercial work.

## Alternatives

- Ronak Shah: Use Ronak Shah when the bottleneck is creator supply or retention behavior outside subscriptions rather than the shop's channel economics. One post describes a nine-figure beauty brand that switched off paid advertising for 18 months and built a base of nano and micro creators that later became its TikTok Shop engine, and gives a working prompt for pulling creators in a category, scoring them on fit and engagement, and producing a seeding list of about 200 names to test. The other works the other end of the brief: subscription programs convert roughly 20% of repeat customers, so the reorder revenue of the remaining 80% is largely unmanaged, and the argument is to predict when a specific customer is ready to reorder instead of waiting on a schedule. For a brand whose question is where the first 200 seed creators come from, or how to hold repeat revenue that never enters a subscription, this is the closer starting point.
- Juan David Pinto: Use Juan David Pinto when the shop is being switched on before the brand has earned any attention on the platform. The published argument is that TikTok Shop does not create demand, it captures demand that already exists: brands should build organic content first, turn the best-performing videos into Spark Ads, track what converts rather than what gets views, and only then let the shop compound on warm traffic. The comparison to opening a store in an empty mall is the point. For a brand that enabled Shop early and is watching nothing convert, this sequence is a more direct diagnosis than a channel-economics analysis.
- Jonathan McGraw: Use Jonathan McGraw when the real obstacle is internal: leadership or finance questioning whether TikTok Shop deserves funding at all and asking for a number that goes beyond in-platform revenue. The published case is that the economics of the channel can look rough while the commerce it creates elsewhere looks strong — Amazon lift, direct-to-consumer impact, and total commerce revenue argued from cross-channel consumer and Amazon-brand studies, with the honest note that attribution stays messy. A second post reads a Prime Day signal where product page views fell while conversion and orders improved, and argues more of the purchase decision is now won before a shopper reaches a product page. When the brief needs an argument for measuring the halo rather than a shop operating plan, this is the closer fit.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/